Today, with the development of technology and the improvement of environment, human lifespan has extended remarkably and therefore, the ratio of old people to total population increases every day.
Also, with the increase in population of old people, the accident rate for the old people is increasing with respect to the total accident rate. The reason for this is that, as people get older, people are slow in recognizing and responding to surrounding environments. Also, with the development of technology, vehicles are essential to mankind like theirs hands and feet and the age at which people begin driving is decreasing.
As described above, the increase in old drivers and young drivers raise a possibility that accidents occur due to lack of proficiency in driving a vehicle. In particular, there is a survey indicating that inexperienced drivers and old people find it hardest to park a vehicle when driving the vehicle.
Therefore, many vehicle manufacturers have actively developed technologies for automatically parking a vehicle without an operation of a driver, and the leading technology among the technologies is an automatic parking technology.
The automatic parking technology is a function for searching for and recognizing an available parking space for a vehicle by using sensors mounted on the vehicle and allowing the vehicle by itself to be automatically parked in the found parking space without a driving operation of a driver. The automatic parking technology has been developed from a function for assisting only a steering operation into a function for automatically changing a gear as well as operating a brake and an accelerator.
On the other hand, in the case of an existing automatic parking function, when a manual operation of a driver occurs during automatic parking of a vehicle, the automatic parking function is released since it is recognized that an emergency situation occurs.
The driver may want to release the automatic parking function and operate her or his own vehicle through the manual operation. On the other hand, the manual operation of the user may be caused by a simple mistake or may be made depending on situations with various intentions, such as in order to cope with a current situation or change current parking settings. In the majority of cases, drivers may want a vehicle to be parked in a target parking position.
Therefore, user inconvenience may be caused when the automatic parking function is released in response to the manual operation without grasping the intention of the driver with respect to the manual operation.